Hey,
It’s not a tradition as such, but there’s a pattern I often fall into around the same time every year. In the week between Christmas and New Year’s, and sometimes stretching into mid-January, I get back into video games. I don’t play much during the rest of the year— certainly not as much as I did when I was younger— but there’s something about late December and early January where it’s all I want to do. I usually chalk it up to fatigue and wanting a brief vacation from my brain; after the rollercoaster that was 2019, that familiar tired feeling returned in a big way. I haven’t been able to indulge last year due to my Xbox 360 kicking the bucket, but my new living situation comes with an enticing fringe benefit— access to a PS4.
And so, in the couple of weeks after Christmas (which included a whole week in which I had the house all to myself), I’ve revisited Skyrim.
I first played it a few years ago (on my now-nearly-dead 360) but I didn’t quite get the full experience. I blew through the main quest, thinking I would get to all the side quests after I finished the story, and then just never went exploring. I moved on to other things, and then my console died, and that was that.
This time around I’m only grudgingly following the main quest. I’ve spent most of my time on my current game doing side quests— including a lot of wandering around the map, stumbling across dungeons and clearing them out, racking up treasure and XP— but also focusing on personal projects. I built up my Smithing skill mostly for the sake of having an area of expertise other than swinging an axe and killing monsters. I did some errands just to ingratiate myself with a local Jarl enough to buy some land, and then proceeded to build a house on it. I approached an NPC that my character had built a working relationship with and asked her to marry me. We now live in that house I built, two queer sword ladies with some adopted children and a cow. There’s always fresh baked bread in that house.
I’m not sure if this is exactly the kind of wish fulfillment fantasy the developers had intended to enable with this game, but here we are.
Eventually I’ll have to finish the main story. And I will. But for now I’m content to build up skills and have smaller adventures and settle into this new home.
***
A lot of my emotional energy in 2019 was taken up by two big things— transition, and a new relationship. At my friend’s New Years’ Eve party, I started thinking about what 2020 will look like. I realized I don’t really have any other big things coming up this year.
Which is to say, I don’t have any big professional or personal happenings that will be, for lack of a better term, complete stories onto themselves. Not like falling in love was. Not like telling everyone I’m a girl was.
What I do have coming up this year is the start of several big things which won’t really bloom for another few years.
I feel like 2020, to borrow from a gardener friend of mine, is going to be a planting year.
So in the interests of transparency and accountability, here is what I’m going to be working on this year:
Get at least part of the way there on my legal name change. (There are complications, which I won’t get into here, that make this project difficult. But I want this, so I’m settling in for the long haul.)
Build up a freelance writing beat outside of soccer.
Write more fiction, including a good start on my big fiction project (which I won’t talk about just yet).
Look for, and hopefully land, a day job. This is a big one for me; I love writing and I’m grateful I’ve been able to pay some bills with it, but I’m coming to realize that no one is presently willing to pay me a living wage to write about soccer, and that might never change. With some anticipated big changes in my personal life coming in the next few years, I need to be able to count on a stable paycheck in order to make those things possible. Also, frankly, I’ve been in survival mode for my entire adult life, and I’m done with that. I’m ready to thrive, you know?
I don’t have a particularly good track record with relationships, and more than once I found myself in the position of not knowing what to do or where to go once the New Relationship Energy wears off. That’s a pattern I don’t care to repeat. The rush of new love carried me through 2019, and now I feel like it’s time to put that energy to work. So, a big priority for me is putting more personal resources and bandwidth into the relationship with an eye toward building something to last.
And while relationships require two (or more) people to put in the work, some of that is going to entail work I do on myself this year. Right before Christmas, I was diagnosed with PTSD. While I’m grateful to have the diagnosis, because it opens up resources that might not have been available without it, seeing it on my chart hit me like a ton of bricks. A big part of the work of 2020 is addressing my trauma, coming to terms with it, and beginning the long and slow process of healing from it.
Most of this won’t pay off in 2020. It’s all prepping the soil for 2021, and 2025, and 2030, and beyond. After going through much of my life feeling incapable of planning for the future, of believing that Not Dying was the best I could hope for in a given year, this feels like wholly unfamiliar territory. It’s frightening. It’s nourishing. It’s going to mean a lot of work.
Take care,
Bridget